BBC misreports John Kerry on talks
failure

For
once, US Secretary of State John Kerry was not mincing his
words when he blamed Israel for the breakdown of talks with
the Palestinians.

But you would not have known this if you
were following the story from the BBC News
website.

What Kerry actually saidHere is how
Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of the news website
Mondoweiss characterized Kerry’s testimony before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 7
April:

John Kerry, Secretary of State,
blamed the Israelis for the breakdown of peace talks during
a hearing before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee yesterday. Israel failed to release
prisoners on time according to a deal it had with
Palestinians, then announced 700 settlement units –
“poof!”– causing the latest breakdown in the
talks…

And this is what Kerry actually
said:

In my judgment both leaders have made
courageous and important decisions up until now. For Prime
Minister Netanyahu to release prisoners is a painful,
difficult political step to take, enormously hard, and the
people of Israel have been incredibly supportive and patient
in giving him the space in order to do that. In exchange for
the deal being kept of the release of prisoners and not
going to the U.N. Unfortunately, the prisoners weren’t
released on the Saturday they were supposed to be released.
And so day went by, day two went by day three went by and
then in the afternoon when they were about to maybe get
there, 700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem. And
poof! That was sort of the moment.

Weiss
called it possibly a historic moment.

As Juan Cole,
Professor of History at Michigan University,
stresses:

Kerry attributed the breakdown to
two separate Israeli moves. One was to decline to release
the remaining 25 or so Palestinian prisoners jailed before
1993, whose release had been agreed to in the Oslo Peace
Accords (a pledge on which Israel reneged, as it did on the
whole Oslo process), and which Israel had undertaken to free
last August. The second was the announcement of 700 new
squatter homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem by fanatical
Israeli expansionist Housing Minister Uri
Ariel.

Even the Israeli Prime
Minister’s Office said it was disappointed over Kerry’s
remarks, which implicitly means they saw it as apportioning
the blame for the talks’ collapse on Israel.

How the
BBC reported Kerry to absolve IsraelHowever, the BBC
News website chose to fudge the truth by making it seem that
Kerry had blamed not Israel but both Israel and the
Palestinians in equal measure.

According to the
BBC, Kerry “blamed both sides for taking ‘unhelpful’
steps”.

But search Kerry’s full statement and you will
not find the word “unhelpful” anywhere. The only person
who mentioned the word “unhelpful” was State Department
spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as reported by the Israeli news website
Ynet.

So, either the person who wrote the BBC
report is sloppy or incompetent, or there is something more
sinister at work.

Although sloppiness and incompetence are
no strangers to the BBC, there is reasonable ground to
suspect that there is something more sinister.

Raffi
Berg, the BBC’s resident Israel flag waverThis is
none other than Raffi Berg, the head of the Middle East
section of the BBC News website.

As we reported last August, Berg had been
caught sending his staff emails advising them to write more
favourably about Israel. According to Electronic
Intifada, which exposedBerg’s behind-the-scenes work
on behalf of Israel, Berg sent an email to staff during
Israel’s eight-day assault on Gaza in November 2012, which
killed nearly 200 Palestinians, asking
them

to word their stories in a way which
does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel for
starting the prolonged attacks. Instead, he encouraged
journalists to promote the Israeli government line that the
“offensive” was “aimed at ending rocket fire from
Gaza”.

This was despite the fact that Israel broke a
ceasefire when it attacked Gaza on 14 November, a ceasefire
which the Palestinians had been observing – firing no
rockets into Israel

In a second email, sent during the
same period, Berg told BBC journalists: “Please remember,
Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt
controls the southern border.” He omitted to mention that
the UN viewed Israel as the occupying power in Gaza and has
called on Israel to end its siege of the Strip. Israel’s
refusal to do so is a violation of UN Security Council
Resolution 1860.

The similarity between
the instruction to misreport the Israeli aggression on Gaza
and the BBC News website’s downplaying of Kerry’s blame
for the failure of the talks with the Palestinians is too
close to be accidental. We detect the hands of
Berg.

Zionists at the BBC’s helmBerg is not
the only Israel pimp working at the BBC. Others include the
notorious Zionist James Purnell, who in February 2013 was
put in charge of BBC policy and strategy, and the head of
BBC News, James Harding. But whereas Purnell and Harding
expressed their love for apartheid Israel before taking up
their jobs at the BBC, Berg has actually tried to influence
BBC reporting of the Palestine-Israel conflict while working
for the BBC, and he did so openly and blatantly.

According toElectronic Intifada,
in 2011 Harding spoke at a media event organized by the
Jewish Chronicle, telling his
audience:

I am pro-Israel. I believe in the
state of Israel. I would have had a real problem if I had
been coming to a paper [The Times, of which he was editor
before taking up his BBC job] with a history of being
anti-Israel. And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is
pro-Israel.

Eight years ago the BBC’s
governing body commissioned an independent report which concluded that
BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “does not
consistently constitute a full and fair account of the
conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an
incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”. The
reasons for this have long been the subject of serious
academic studies, the best known of which is Greg Philo’s
and Mike Berry’s More Bad News from Israel.

Without
a doubt, the presence of Raffi Berg, James Purnell, James
Harding and other Zionists in key positions at the BBC will
ensure that the corporation’s bias in favour of Israel
will not only continue but will get worst.

As we never
tire of repeating, it is past time that an independent
authority investigate how Zionists in key positions at the
BBC are shaping coverage of the Arab-Israeli
conflict.

This is a matter of grave concern because not
only is the BBC a publicly-funded news organization, but it
is also self-regulated, which means that it pretty much gets
away with murder before anyone will say “poof’, to use
Kerry’s
word.

In response to the challenges facing Scoop and the media industry we’ve instituted an Ethical Paywall to keep the news freely available to the public.
People who use Scoop for work need to be licensed through a ScoopPro subscription under this model, they also get access to exclusive news tools.

So, what happens next? Normally when a major policy like this gets so crushingly rejected – by 230 votes, when Theresa May had reportedly been hoping for a defeat by “only” 70- 100 votes – the PM would resign and/or a fresh election called. More>>

For the past 100 years, the West has sold out the Kurds over and over again. So much so that it came as a surprise yesterday when US National Security advisor John Bolton appeared to walk back the latest act of betrayal... More>>

ALSO:

What do you call a situation where the state tries to create panic among its own people for party political gain? As practiced by Theresa May and her faction of the Conservative Party, this has become a well-honed form of state terrorism… More>>

2018 has been quite a year for Scoop. We are so thrilled to have successfully met the funding target for the first stage of the ‘Scoop 3.0’ plan raising $36,000. This means we can now proceed with the planning phase for the delivery of this bold vision for a community-owned, participatory, independent newsroom... More>>